So it's been a while since our last post, but I wanted to keep the blog going.

There has been a lot of movement in the distributed space so I wanted to take the chance to discuss a simple, yet powerful, way that you can leverage Apache Zookeeper in your environment for a distributed configuration store.

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I wanted to write a quick article on distributing workloads as a sort of "white paper" if you will to illustrate the overall power of distributed approaches and as an easy indicator on the classes of problems that lend themselves well to distribution (and which ones may not be as amenable to the approach).

Also I wanted to tackle the idea that no matter how efficient or powerful systems might be there is always waste and that the waste costs can become significant even when other aspects are considered cost free.

In terms of distributed systems there has been an evolution from simply marshaling resources of multiple devices (usually lower-end or commodity hardware) to actively controlling entire ecosystems of related processes and assets across multiple datacenters and types. In its earliest form, a distributed system was basically a cluster. While the term cluster has many different connotations depending on the field in which it is used, the earliest of these beasts generally contained locally accessible hardware and the hardware was generally considered to be symmetrical.